My wife and I are taking our first real vacation togther and my first real vacation since March of 2002. Going on a cruise. No blogging on board (says she), so I'll catch up with the 2 or 3 of you that still read this blog after Christmas.

For those of you that are skype fans, you know the very familiar when someone chimes in and rings you. At the start of the LesBlogs conference, it's inevitable that someone with their sound turned up on their laptop had an incoming skype call....to which Robert said "we need a new rule, no skype'ing during the conference.

Bloggers are way ahead.

Keep an eye on everything going on at Technorati's LesBlogs tag area.

Flickr photos of the conference here:
Backchannel discussion on the conference here (This is really sweet...)

Amanda talks to random strangers about firefox vs. IE. Obviously, it's done in an urban location where there are enough folks to know the difference. Seriously, and nothing against Green Bay here, but if I did this at home, I'm betting that over half of anyone I acosted for an opinion would not have the slightest on what FireFox is. In fact, many are still using AOL.

Scoble gives a shout to the guys at Cognitive Daily who highlight a report on how mood affects your ability to remember and make word relationships. Bottom line on the study. If you're looking for creativity and ideas, check you mood!

I'm in Paris for LesBlogs 2.0 this week. Had a chance encounter with Mark Fletcher of Bloglines yesterday when we checked into the hotel at the same time. Went to the LesBlogs meetup last night and realized that I don't know too many European bloggers. (surprise...)
[Note to self: expand international blogging horizons]

Rok gives you 11 Reasons For Using RSS Marketing. As if you needed that many. I always think about RSS, but was thinking more after our presentation at SRI last week. Elaine O'Gorman of Silverpop hit home that RSS is a channel. When put in marketing terms - RSS is a marketing channel.

David Teten of Nitron Advisors has been blogging the SRI Blogging conference in detail (partly because he well perched in the front row to capture all this great stuff)

He's got some great posts capturing presentations from
* Pete Blackshaw, Intelliseek
* Alex Williams, Managing Director of Events, Corante
* Janet Johnson, VP Communications, Marqui
* Chas Martin, Director of Communications, BetterManagement.com
* Laurel Touby, CEO, MediaBistro
* Wil Schroter, CEO, Swaplease, and Gobignetwork (3mos. Old).
* Steve Cohen, Sr. Librarian, PubSub

Converseon apparently did a study of the BW top 100 brands and found that 39% of the top 20 listings came from consumer generated media. David Weinberger has referenced Google as 'the first page of any corporate website.' Put these together, and 40% of possible first brand impressions of your company could land somewhere other than your Flash laden beautifully designed home page. Do you know who these people are and what they're writing about you?

It never ceases to amaze me that The Cluetrain Manifesto has become more and more relevant as time goes on. I'm making a motion for all business related shows and podcasts to pick a day of the year where they read the Cluetrain Thesis in the same spirit that we listen to Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" on Thanksgiving Day. Yes, it's that important!